A new staging of György Kurtág's song-cycle Kafka Fragments premieres in the Linbury Studio Theatre this week. Performed by soprano Claire Booth and violinist Peter Manning, the song-cycle will be brought to life in an imaginative new staging by video artist Netia Jones. We caught up with Netia and Claire during rehearsals to find out more:

Is Kafka Fragments only for fans of Kafka’s work?

Netia: Not at all. One of the reasons why Franz Kafka is one of the great authors is not just the brilliance of his writing and observation, but that the themes that he tackles are timeless. These feeling of confusion, alienation and fear are things that just don’t change; they are easy to understand from any point of view or perspective. In our production, we are trying to create something that is timeless.

Claire: The song cycle is so idiosyncratic that it is accessible for those who feel they know nothing about Kurtág and Kafka.

The piece is composed of 40 miniature works that range in length from 12 seconds to four minutes. Does the cycle work as a unified whole?

Netia: It’s actually very important to me that it’s not a unified whole. Although there is a structure to it, there isn’t a narrative. What Kurtág and Kafka offer is an open-ended question – something unfinished that you can explore. There’s not a solution there, but a space for the question itself. It’s a very beautiful piece of music.

Kafka’s characters often show aspects of his own personality, and Kafka Fragments is composed from his diaries and letters. Do you think the song cycle offers insights into the writer himself?

Netia: We’re not exploring anything biographical, but rather the essence of Kafka’s thinking and his approach to life. Because these fragments are so concentrated and so crystalline, you find themes that are recurrent in Kafka’s work.

Netia, you work a lot with visual projections and video. How are you using projected media in this production?

Netia: We are presenting projected translations of the text all the way through. You have to be able to read and understand the actual fragments to grasp their many layers and to know why Kurtág has set them the way he has. The projections also offer moments of illumination. It’s not just about casting light in a physical sense, but offering visual guidance to enable us to grasp the meaning better: fleeting moments when something is illuminated before the light goes off.

Kafka’s texts are often difficult to translate into English. How do you think they translate to music?

Netia: Kurtág brings Kafka’s texts to life in musical form to reveal the real essence of their author. It’s not often that you see such a perfect marriage of music and text.

In some ways, the translation of the spirit of Kafka into music is easier than into the English language."

Claire: Kafka Fragments works because it is the meeting of two men who, though seemingly unrelated in every way, have so much in common. Both said that their work is about their own experiences of life and, in particular, both distil what they do to its most concentrated form so that every utterance has an intensity, and layers of meaning. The cycle is a real pinnacle of vocal writing in the modern age and so it’s an amazing piece to work on. It demands a lot in regards to performance, but I like a challenge.

About ten years ago the American illusionist David Blaine performed an extreme endurance stunt in London – he starved himself for 44 days, suspended in a transparent box over the Southbank. As he entered the box he told the crowd why he was doing it: ‘The feeling of wonder is amazing… I’m going to push myself as far as I can.’

Eighty years earlier, Franz Kafka published A Hunger Artist – a short story about a man who confines himself to a circus cage and starves himself to death. But when Kafka’s hunger artist is asked why he has chosen such a performance, he unexpectedly replies: ‘I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss about it and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’

The more cynical of Blaine’s audience speculated that his test of the limits of human endurance was actually an inauthentic spectacle. He is an illusionist, after all – perhaps his water was laced with vitamins, or his blanket steeped in salt for him to suck out. Hunger artists have always courted scepticism, and for Kafka’s perhaps dying was the best way to demonstrate his sincerity.

Kafka’s writing reminds us that the limitations of existence are commonplace, and he is the more engaging for being matter of fact about it. He treats the deaths of his fictional creations (many of them displaying aspects of his own personality) with far less reverence than fans treated Blaine’s experiment.

Kafka himself had been losing weight when he conceived and wrote A Hunger Artist and he would die from tuberculosis a little over two years later. He was also in a relationship with a journalist called Milena Jesenská, to whom he vented emotions, imaginations, nightmares and ailments in almost daily letters. ‘So the thought of death frightens you?’ he wrote in one, ‘One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark.’ For Kafka, like his hunger artist, life was a brief window of futile searching: a yearning for higher understanding foiled at every turn by its impossibility.

When György Kurtág composed his Kafka Fragments song cycle (1985–7) he compiled the libretto from scraps of Kafka’s writings collected over years; diaries, letters and aphorisms, variously cryptic, mundane, confessional and aphoristic. There are hints of haiku-like sense: ‘Like a pathway in the autumn: hardly has it been swept clean, it is covered again with dry leaves.’ There are reflections on the tedium of everyday life: ‘Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life,’ but there are also genuine-sounding confessions: ‘I can’t actually… tell a story, in fact I am almost unable even to speak’.

Kafka’s writing is infused with this awareness of human limitation – from the protagonist in The Trial and his anxious pursuit of an explanation of the unspecified crime an inscrutable court has charged him with, to the frustration faced by the protagonist of The Castle who will never be admitted to the castle and yet cannot return home. In a letter to his friend Max Brod, Kafka wrote, ‘Literature helps me to live, but wouldn’t it be truer to say that it furthers this sort of life?’

Kurtág's song cycle offers a rare opportunity to read Kafka through the prism of music. We have a glimpse of this from Kafka himself, in a line from a letter to Milena included in the Fragments – ‘None sing as purely as those in deepest Hell; it is their singing that we take for the singing of Angels.’

]]>http://www.roh.org.uk/news/franz-kafka-cryptic-confessional-aphoristic/feed1Guide to the Royal Opera House Spring Season 2012/13http://www.roh.org.uk/news/guide-to-the-royal-opera-house-spring-season-201213
http://www.roh.org.uk/news/guide-to-the-royal-opera-house-spring-season-201213#commentsWed, 21 Nov 2012 19:10:35 +0000Lottie Butlerhttp://www.roh.org.uk/?p=15975Spring Season 2012/3 One Extraordinary World. The Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera opens the Spring Season with David McVicar’s enchanting production of Die Zauberflöte, a sophisticated fairytale brought to life on stage by McVicar’s fantastical staging. Mozart’s classic is followed by Nicholas Hytner’s magisterial production of Verdi’s Don Carlo, set in the political and religious turmoil of Renaissance France and Spain. The Spring Season also includes two new productions on the main stage: Rossini’s La donna del lago - a production by Associate Director of Opera John Fulljames - and Richard Jones’s production of Britten’s Gloriana, whichmarks both 60 years since the opera’s premiere at Covent Garden and the centenary of Britten’s birth.

From the exoticism of 19th century India, to political intrigue in Austria, via the weird and wonderful world of Lewis Carroll, The Royal Ballet is staging three big narrative ballets in the Spring Season. Christopher Wheeldon’s magical Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens on 15 March, followed by Makarova’s La Bayadère. A tragic tale about the life of a temple dancer, Bayadère is famous for the mesmerizing Kingdom of Shades sequence. Kenneth MacMillan’s dramatic Mayerling follows, opening on 19 April. Based on the life and suicide of the disturbed Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary, it is considered to be one of MacMillan’s most psychologically and choreographically rich ballets.

In the Linbury Studio Theatre you can experience a programme of new ballets choreographed by members of The Royal Ballet, in our annual Draftworks performances. Kafka Fragments is acclaimed director Netia Jones's production of a song cycle based on Kafka's letters and diaries, while another literary source is transformed into performance in David Bruce's magical opera adapted from Philip Pullman's story The Firework-Maker's Daughter. Co-produced by The Opera Group and Opera North, The Firework-Maker's Daughter is also a new production by John Fulljames.

To accompany the productions on-stage, Royal Opera House Restaurants are providing menus tailored specially for each production. Find out more closer to the time in our Restaurants and Bars section.